Armstrong Is Us

Bigger, faster, and stronger is the way forward for sports. We want our stadiums to be bigger, our live video streaming to be faster, and our teams to be stronger. How is an athlete to keep up with such pressing demands? They cheat. Of course they do. Sports are big box office with power agents, entourages and real big money contracts. The pressure couldn’t be greater for the athletes. The competition is stiff and unforgiving. The diets, strength training, and former secrets of the trade, once kept on lockdown in the depths of franchise locker rooms, are now simply a quick Google search away. The drugs are no longer the secrets, but rather how to get away with using them.

Why not? It’s wow that we want, not wimps. I want my athletes to have robotic chips, bionic arms, and if they have a life expectancy of 40 years, hey, that’s not my problem. Because sports is entertainment and that is what I demand. Suggesting that an athlete cannot take performance enhancing drugs is the equivalent of telling a porn actor they can’t have body-enhancing supplements or procedures.

Let the audience decide – just follow the money. If given the choice to watch football with athletes that abide by the rules versus a league where athletes can pump themselves up with as much juice and synthetic crap they need to give them a step-up from the competition, the latter would surely win, with Budweiser and Pepsi waving the flag high and wide.

Or simply look to fact: Olympic wrestling has a difficult enough time raising enough funds just too get to the Games, but WWE has a half billion market cap.

So maybe Lance was onto something. No matter what, though, the message remains the same: never be too early, and the moment more than one person knows the secret, everybody knows it. Armstrong’s biggest mistake was thinking he could keep his drug use a secret forever.

We made Lance Armstrong. All this hypocritical cant is just that — cant. We know what we want. And we know what it takes to get it.

Wrestlers pumped up on steroids riding bicycles up the Alpe d’Huez? Now that I’d watch on pay-per-view.